Blog of Aestheticized Violence.
Cornell University, Classes: One Girl in All the World and American Flow

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Raise Your Weapon

A few weeks ago, I posted about Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks," a song that featured violent lyrics over a chilled out beat. Today, when cruising the internet for some new music, I found this track titled "Raise Your Weapon," by the Deadmau5. I originally thought that the song would simply be gritty and loud, but it starts out with a progressive tone and turns into the grossed out dubstep we all know. This got me thinking about the influence of violence in all types of music. We are used to seeing violent lyrics in hip hop. We rap along with Lil Wayne and The Game as they talk about shooting people and slapping hoes. However, in the past few months, have encountered several songs that don't seem to be simply about gang violence. Artists like Deadmau5 have most likely not encountered the kind of violence that gangster rappers have, but they seem to be infatuated with the idea. Violence in house music is an interesting thing, because house was made for the clubs. Yet, in this song, chorus is simply "Raise Your Weapon" repeated over and over again. We cannot really understand the actual meaning of the lyrics themselves, because they are so ambiguous. We can only listen to the thumping beats while hearing a girl sing about weapons. The mystery behind this (violent?) song keeps me interested.

4 comments:

What the pancakes? People raise their weapon when they surrender. If anything , this is a peaceful song about true love and someone's story of it. The other person has "dropped bombs" on all that they built. And the singer says that if the other person raises his weapon (surrenders) they can go back to peace and to loving each other. The fact that you have given this the term barbaric and violent seems very ignorant and pedantic of you.

Not exactly... (also another great song by deadmau5 btw) You need to listen to the full album version. The song is actually about a relationship coming to an end, most likely from a lot of hateful words and anger. SOFI (the singer..SOFI=Some Other Female Interest) says raise your weapon meaning give me all you got, the hateful words, the pain, get it all out of your system because this is all gonna come back to bite you in the a**!!!! ((Lyric: Dropping your bombs now, on all we've built, how does it feel now to watch it burn, burn, burn?)) She's basically rubbing it in his face saying "Alright, you wanna do this? Let's do it then." A woman scorned :) The dubstep at the end is great because it really captures that rage of going through a rough break-up.